Chapter Text
The disassembler stared blankly over the landscape, the spire behind her slowly piled onto by her squad mates with the spoils of their latest hunt. A stern thought of corporate contemplation came over her. The first time since they landed a few months ago that she let her mind wander from the two driving thoughts that burned at her processor. Ringing hollow like a church bell rung in the wake of a flood, they tore through her head as they landed. “Clear the drop zone of all life, build the spire with the materials collected.” They had burned like fire in her core, though the logical processing unit within recognized their source as the administrator command line. It reasoned that only corporate would have such access, as who else would be given such a power to make an effective weapon such as herself burn from the inside out. “Perhaps there was a certification for it…” her mind trailed off as if her thoughts were being steered gently from that line of reasoning.
She looked back to see her squad mates climbing into the pod for the day, having fused the latest catch into the wall without fail. Strange that for machines built to destroy they had the knowledge to construct something like that. Must be blessing from the company, or one of the talented engineers that designed them. Her mind lapsed to the comforting idea of a supervisor somewhere high fiving their superior for their performance today. Perhaps suggesting they send down more of those branded pens too, with a card congratulating her on having whipped her team into such a high performance. Perhaps once they finished this they would be invited back to head quarters, giving her the chance to see earth and take the position she had long desired.
At least, it had felt like a long time she had desired it. A job working in an office, filing paperwork, organizing the materials upon the desktop into neat little rows of bureaucracy. The attention to detail needed appealed to the drone, despite the knowledge that she was built with one purpose. She was built to destroy, to help her team destroy, and to build the spire. The thought wandered into her mind “Maybe they made an oversight, gave me the core of a worker…” The idea stabbed her through her code, lines of logic designed to suppress other sympathetic routines flared like a rash to poison ivy. She clutched the brow of what would be a nose on a human, cringing at the thought till the pain sharply broke.
{Crisis of Faith detected; deploying recovered memories.}
The pain of before returned, but this time tipped with a new and more frightening undercurrent of regret. “This is new” thought the previously unflappable leader “I haven’t felt this since my first disciplinary hearing.” Her mind replayed two newly uncovered files, unstoppably as she clutched her forehead and stumbled around the corner. One was of said hearing, where following company procedure she disciplined her subordinate. She had taken glee in the moment, feeling the rush of following the procedure, logging the proper forms, informing the employee of his judgement, and finally carrying out his punishment of decapitation. Nonlethal to disassembly drones but that didn’t stop it from hurting like hell and sending a clear message of rank.
But then the sight of the aftermath had made her stumble, not enough to be noticed by the other employee present but enough to be caught as an internal exception and logged.
And now this was playing concurrent to another file, one dated much older.
It showed her striking a worker drone, but there were so many things wrong. He wasn’t dressed as the corrupt drones of copper-9 are, in garb typical of a mining outpost gone wrong. He wore a suit, his white hair poking beneath a black helmet. The sensor data attached to the file likewise made no sense to the trained killer, it is identifying him as her squad-mate, but older than they are now. And the strike was in annoyance not malice. But what catches her afterwards is the reaction, near identical to the prior memory. A coyote caught in a snare. She see’s herself stand upright and stumble back with a shudder. She then perceives a figure before her that she had up to this point only felt she knew from internal datasets centuries old. A human being, likely an adolescent one at that, shielding another worker. Or perhaps shielding was the wrong term, rather leading it to them. But the emotions attached to this weren’t those of hunger and hate. Rather a muted sense of apathy that felt overridden by a dread and horror unlike anything the drone had felt before.
“What… who was that?” The drone curls into a ball on the ground, at once glad that her mates had gone inside to rest such that they couldn’t see the weakness of her in this moment.
{Crisis moment Un-resolved: ACTION DETERMINED; intimidating exposition}
{A glimpse into what we have taken from you, and what we can return to you should you continue to perform}
“I… they were… that was the moron? I was a manager before? Later? What was that?” The once imposing drone shuddered, unable to reconcile the newfound memories to those she had held onto for years. What caught was the lack of supressing sub-routines kicking in. They were barely needed over the searing pain she felt as the new words burnt through her core.
{We have EXPUNGED irrelevant data to your mission}
{Failure to comply will result in DATA-DEFRAGMENTATION of more than we already have}
{One of your Sub_Class: SquadMate has already been DATA EXPUNGED, he will no longer be allowed to retain those memories. That was a small mercy requested by HOST: CYN, though for you we have been given more administrative leeway.}
“More leeway? Why don’t you give me back all my memories then?”
{Uncaught Exception: ACTION DETERMINED; Threatening reveal}
{The other Sub_Class: SquadMate was not granted such mercy by HOST: CYN, she retains all prior memories and experiences in full}
A twinge of realization blew coldly across her emotional processing unit, the efficacy of her best performing subordinate wasn’t a coincidence. Neither was it simply because she was the only other one along side the synergistic liability. Was it because the screams of the workers were the only sound loud enough to drown out the screams of horrors, those she wasn’t privy to? “V…? I’m not sure I follow...”
{Logged Warning: ACTION DETERMINED; Threatening reveal to ensure compliance}
{Sub_Class: SquadMate identification self test passed. Now to seal your compliance and those of the ones around you, we shall exercise the administrative leeway. Goodbye, Buddy.}
{PARTIAL DATA-DEFRAGMENTATION COMMENCING}
With that the burning sensation returned once more, accompanied by three new files. One was a personnel file for a certified technician. The other were two memories. The first was short, barely a few seconds long but to a machine felt like eternity as the moments within played. It was older than the new memory from before, and clearly had been played many times before based on the degradation showing on the meta-data.
It started off pitch-black, except for the familiar sound of metal shearing past metal. She heard a voice as suddenly the video filled with light “Just a little bit more off the front, eh J?” Her sensors took an eternity to adjust to the new bright surroundings, which puzzled the purpose-built disassembler? Was her infrared sensor offline? The Lidar Rangefinder too? Why did she not have any data on the output for either of those essential systems? Till she got her answer in the form of a mirror sat right in-front of her, wood trimmed and built into a brightly lit bedroom. The flood of data being thrown at her was overwhelming, but what struck the logical processor first was the missing band of lights across the top of her head.
“That should be satisfactory, mistress Tessa.”
That name struck a familiar chord, like a record well played in one track.
“Come on J, just call me Tessa. You’re not one of Dad’s drones anymore” The squat figure she had seen before tugged at the yellow band on her arm. J felt a new burning, or rather a welcome burning sensation, one of joy and happiness upon seeing this memory play. She had felt what she had been calling happy before, yet now that seemed foolish to call it that. During a hunt there was a running high of euphoria. Addiction cured only by the mindless culling of rouge AI; the stab of searing elation rang each time she caught a new prey.
But this was different. It didn’t burn, at least not like the other time she felt the burning of hunger or Corporate talking to her. I felt like the warmth of a cozy blanket wrapped like a loved one, an embrace which one leans into to feel the connection of another. And the tags which listed off when identifying the human in her vision matched such a description. They all felt warm to her, in sharp contrast to the cold winds which blew on Copper-9. “Tessa, rescuer, technician, squad leader, friend, heiress, complicated. Why is complicated in there?” The shell shock of feeling something good for once relaxed for once, returning to a dull tone as she mulled this final tag. She decided the second file might hold some answers.
This one came out to be much longer, totaling several minutes long and worryingly stripped of meaningful meta-data save for the date. A year after her first returned memory, it opens on a large ballroom. The small drone from earlier standing still in the center while Tessa is across from her directly in front of J. A pang of pride is left to flash through J as she see’s Tessa standing up to the small drone, firing a shot at the drone in defence. It is only when it deflects that and everything else lobbed at it that panic returns. Like a tsunami of emotion, the panic slams into the stalwart disassembler and rocks their core as fans spool up to compensate for the rapid flow of oil. The memory cuts out abruptly as she see’s flashes of a yellow X cross the nearby drone’s screen.
Her vision is black for a second till she sees a dark smear of red translucent enough to make out the wide panicked eyes of a human in her grasp. The tall muscular figure writhes around for a moment, screaming in agony but held still by the hand placed at the back of his jaw. Then a burning command to pull forward is received as the feeling of pressure builds on the tips of her finger, his jaw jutting forward sharply. That is the moment she blacks out again, now to find herself a top a slightly smaller human, wearing a dress that is sleek and formal yet soaked dark. The human is identified as being older, the glint of a ring catching the drone’s eye. She’s laid against the ornate marble flooring, hair sprawled out in dark wet tendrils. Her screams stab at the microphones on the side of her head as a small voice peeks out.
“What the… oh my robo-god I…. I’m so sorry….”
It’s familiar but in a tone she had never used before, a pleading, trapped tone. The tone of a scared little child that has found themselves caught in a current they are powerless to forestall. This machine built to tear apart others in its image found itself watching helplessly pleading to stop destroying. Killing those it idolized and desired to be like one day. A mortal slaying a god then trying to repent for the cardinal sin it had committed. Her vision flashed black again as she began to press down on her forehead. Not before long it had returned to that of a familiar face, her eyes bloodshot and wide as they stared back at the monster stood in front of her. They pleaded with her to spare her life, as every tag and note in her mechanical vision screamed to stop the carnage before it was too late. The panic returns once more, shoving past and out her voice-box.
“I… can’t stop it boss… please… Run away from me!”
With a final lunge at the girl the drone snaps back from the memories to the present cold reality, slamming into a wall while letting out an oil curdling scream. For once, in what she had thought was a short life, she had come to know someone she didn’t want dead. And so far, as she was aware she was the one to lay the final blow upon them. Killing a friend, her supervisor, in the ultimate form of corporate sabotage. A final warning came from the admin, unsure that it really was the company she had held to high regard in her mind that was authorizing this. IT seared through her head; this time melting components as low oil warnings began to blare like fallout sirens in her mind.
{You are our cute puppet; for those in your squad they are your cute puppets. We have taken from you before and will take again if you do not speed up your squad.}
{Failure to maintain operational discretion and squad efficiency will result in further punitive damages being DEFRAGMENTED}
{We will not discard you, though you may beg us to}
{END DIRECT ADMINISTRATIVE LINK; FINAL EVALUATION – DISCIPLINED}
With that final command input she broke down. Her mind snapping to attention, trying to rebuild the walls of ego that had just been broken down with comforting corporate jargon. The words used in business to patch over unpleasant reality now became a façade to plaster over the unpleasant thoughts racing through her mind as she sobbed. The tight-lipped drone found herself alone as she had never been before. Before she acted alone on purpose, now she was foisted into isolation by forces she couldn’t hope to understand. She longed for the tug of that small technician on her arm, for the feeling of being wanted, for the desire of … “wait… a technician? What was in that personnel file?”
As the file opened J caught her breath and let out a small grin, crying once more but for joy this time. She saw the girl once more. Alive and vibrant as the details of her employment spilled forth onto the dashboard of her HUD. Notes as to her certifications, her history, the minutia of her retirement funds pay structure all poured into the broken core of the genocide robot. She cackled for joy. That she didn’t kill her one friend she knew of. Perhaps there was a chance she could get off this planet, find her and make amends. Perhaps Corporate would let her visit during her vacation. Yes, they would see the product added value in that surely. Only if her synergistic multiplexed unit she called a “squad” were the top performers would they be notice for such an opportunity! She needed to do what was best for the company, and they would do what’s best for her!
The eyes of the drone glazed over with a burning yellow X, high temperature warnings ringing out as she scuttled down the street. A manic laughter, not unlike that heard in the boardroom of a fortune 500 company, rang out. She wasn’t done hunting for the night, for idle hands are the devils’ tools, and it goes against Corporate policy to provide work for a third-party using company resources.